January 2, 2011

Our Natural Amphitheater

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It's been only three days since the announcement that San Francisco has been chosen to host the 34th America's Cup, but already much has been made of how the bay is a 'natural amphitheater' for viewing sailing events.

What the heck is a 'natural amphitheater' anyway?

As far as I can tell, it's a term to describe San Francisco Bay that found its way into a press release from team Oracle a few months back and that has been repeated repeatedly by a lot of people who are too lazy to make up their own descriptive metaphors.

'Amphitheater' comes from two Greek words meaning 'on both sides' and 'place for viewing'. An ancient amphitheater looks a lot like what we'd call a stadium today.

Ancient amphitheater

Modern (sort of) stadium

But you can imagine the raised eyebrows there'd be in a roomful of marketing dudes writing a press release for Larry Ellison if someone suggested the next America's Cup was going to be sailed in "the big stadium" of San Francisco.

The marketing dudes must have been sitting around an impressive iroko table before lunch, getting hungrier and thirstier, staring at a whiteboard with the words 'big stadium' crossed out, and with everyone drumming their fingers on the table.

Then, some genius blurted it out - "Wait a minute, I've got it!"

"Natural Amphitheater"

"That's it! It's got flow. It's got grandeur. It's total bullshit."

"OK, lunch!"

It's roomfuls of thirsty admen that have given us all sorts of cool, meaningless phrases like that.

- Corinthian leather.

- Natural beechwood aging

- Tastes great, less filling

- If nature didn't, Warner's will.

(Maybe most of my readers are too young to remember that last one, but it's still one of my favorites. You could look it up)

At any rate, what's bothering me most about this is the huge number of container ships, tankers, tugboats, ferries, sightseeing boats, and other badass commercial traffic that always seems to be plowing right through the orchestra pit of our natural amphitheater.

I know that almost every time I want to pirouette from stage left to stage right, I have to alter course to avoid being mowed down by that badass traffic.

Maybe I should be crossing from Blackaller Buoy over to Angel Island via the mezzanine of our natural amphitheater.

This has been tossed off by many as a simple problem to solve, but what exactly are they going to do with this endless parade of freighters and tankers that needs to get from the Golden Gate over to Richmond or Oakland? Our natural amphitheater doesn't have a green room where they can wait for the better part of a day. We can't call up China and say, "Look, could you hold up on the refrigerators, iPads, and SpongeBob SquarePants dolls until next month?"

I say we do nothing at all. Let them all come.

If Larry wants this to be the America's Cup for the rest of us - the one that the public can actually get to see and connect with - then why not let it be racing the way the rest of us race? For what Midwinters or Big Boat series or Three Bridge Fiasco or Friday night beercan race is all commercial traffic stopped in our natural amphitheater?

If you have to plan the next upwind leg around your best guess of what the Mitsubishi Maru is going to do, then why shouldn't Russell Coutts?

How cool would it be to watch two monster high-tech cats splitting tacks around an 800-foot long supertanker doing 18 knots down the starboard layline?

19 comments:

Love it! I was just figuring out how to make Murder at the Yacht Cllub into a screenplay with the AC in the background, so Clint could film it and guarantee good weather for the racing (according to people who've worked with him, he always gets good weather when he's filming). Maybe there's also a way to work the shipping traffic into the movie.

Geesh, Carol Anne, all Clint would need to guarantee good weather here would be to schedule shooting in September.

I can see him staging a high-speed powerboat chase along San Francisco's famous city front and then having to slice through the chaos of the spectator fleet. I don't know how he'd work in the mandatory shot of the vendor's cart getting trashed, though.

Tillerman, only your perceptive eye would have seen through my little ruse. This post really has nothing to do with the America's Cup at all, but is a carefully crafted celebration of that often ignored hardwood.

Baydog, I think you're referring to George Sashimi, whose famous furniture designs were based upon the simple shapes he found in the raw fish at his favorite sushi bar.

I understand that the Mayor's marketing dudes recently had lunch around an orinoco table and decided to upgrade the phrase from "natural amphitheater" to "magnificent amphitheater". They also issued a revised Cliché Guidelines Handbook to all sailing journalist in the Bay area requesting that they should refer to the shoreline of the bay as the "iconic waterfront".

I plan on taking a tour of the natural amphitheater from the cushy confines of a luxury suite, the Magnificent Yacht VALIS during the esteemed race known as the Three Bridge Fiasco. Will you be joining the festivities?

Good point, Zen. The hallmark of any natural amphitheater is good acoustics.

I'm not sure why you're taking a string bass along on your Pacific crossing, but it's got to sail at least as well as an El Toro.

Edward, I'll probably miss the Three Bridge Fiasco again this year, but you've got to tell me more about your technique for scoring such impressive rides. You can't be doing it on boyish good looks alone.

Firesign Theatre used the name Rocky Rococo for the villain in Nick Danger. They in turn stole it from Rocky Racoon on the Beatle's White Album. And that song written by Paul McCartney is clearly a pastiche of The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert Service.

But is this just idle Google? Or did you actually listen to the tales of Nick Danger, third eye?

And delving even further into the cultural pillars of my youth, what late-night New York radio dude used to recite The Shooting of Dan McGrew on a recurring basis, using tortured background music to enhance his inspired reading?

Jean Shepherd - who later narrated and co-scripted the movie A Christmas Story.

"You'll shoot your eye out!"

My father owned a book of Robert Service's poetry (possibly the only book of poetry he ever owned) and I developed a reputation within the family for dramatic readings of some of my favorite poems from that book whenever the extended family was gathered together at holidays.

I was one of the 'night people' who listened to his old WOR radio show (which could be heard up and down the east coast). The show developed something of a cult following among dysfunctional adolescents like me. Pounding out 45 unscripted minutes every night, he gradually developed a whole cast of characters who he'd weave into tales of his Indiana youth.

Christmas Story is really a distillation of those stories. When the movie came out, people would tell me about it, but anyone who'd listened to the radio show already knew its plot, all of the whacky characters, and that Ralphie was actually Shepherd.

I think he was one of America's great unsung humorists. It was good to see him finally get some of the recognition he deserved.

It being Friday night, and I having had an extra glass of wine (or two), I mistakenly left off the "x" to complete Jazzbeaux's name, or "jazzbo" to which it was sometimes shortened.

I also left out a favorite remembrance. Upon Jazzbeaux's death in 1997, Jonathan Schwartz, another (still broadcasting in NYC) iconic DJ, recalled that he still carried one of Al's business cards with the following rhetorical question on the back:

Where is O Dock?

For the literal minded, O Dock is in Berkeley, California, where I keep an old Catalina 30, but O Dock is really more a state of mind. It's where a part of me lives whenever I can't actually be sailing.